


PUREBLOOD

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-30
Updated: 2007-10-12
Packaged: 2019-01-19 21:31:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 3,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12418560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: How can one word contain families as different as the Weasleys and the Blacks?  The Potters and the Lestranges?  The Crouches and the Malfoys?  The Longbottoms and the Lovegoods?  The Dumbledores and the Crabbes?  A series of drabbles on the many different things it means to be a pureblood.  Chapter titles will spell pureblood.





	1. P rophetic dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

Cassandra Trelawney was a powerful Seer and a brilliant witch.  She harnessed her ability to become respected and powerful, without becoming a popular sideshow or an expensive preview service.  She was the greatest prophet of four centuries, and she knew how to wield her power - and the power of her name.

Generations later, her name is enough for a skeptical headmaster to be unable to refuse to see her nearly talentless descendant.  Sybill Trelawney is almost a Squib and quite aware that she was both interviewed and hired only because of her great-great-grandmother’s talent and reputation.

Sybill Trelawney holds only the dwindling power of a proud family history.  She is a prophet only in her dreams.

The unworthy heir, the false successor, of a great lady.  The rest of her family destroyed by Grindelwald, she had no other example to follow but the ancient shining star of Cassandra.  She has the right to claim relation and no right at all to be her heir.  


But though the Trelawnies have lost the wit to harness or even recognize their abilities, their power has not yet winked out of existence.  It clings desperately to the fringe of reality, not ready to die out completely.


	2. U ndeniable duty, undefendable crime

It was predetermined.  There was no choice in the matter.

Percival Dumbledore did not hate Muggles, but he would kill them.  Perhaps he would have killed the men who did this to his little girl in any case, but these were boys.  He could forgive them – to a degree.  They knew not what they did; he could allow them to live.

But that is not how things are done.  It could not even be a crime, once, because it was expected and must be done in any case.

It could have been a trap set by his enemies it was so clever and inescapable.

He would have done better by his family to stay and help care for Ariana and support Kendra and the boys.  It was not an option.

Nor would he hide it or purchase his freedom.  Or even use their actions as his excuse.  Because it might work, and he could not let that happen.  Muggles…deserved better than that, and he had business only with three of them.  He would do his duty.  He would kill boys he did not hate and go quietly to prison.

That was just like a Dumbledore: old-fashioned enough to avenge the family honor, liberal enough to sully the family name.


	3. R est in peace

The Potters’ in-laws never really understood the Quest, the Peverell Legacy or the prophecy of the Deathly Hallows.  The devotion to this cause was instilled, ingrained, in the family, their destiny tied to it.  A secret prophecy of Cassandra Trelawney had told them that a Potter would someday reunite the Hallows once again when the wizarding world was in greatest need.

James’s mother had rolled her eyes at her husband, son and sister-in-law.  Lily took a more vocal approach and refused “to be buried under a headstone with that creepy eye thing on it.”  It was an argument that spanned the whole of their marriage, eventually resolved with the agreement to honor the funeral arrangements of the first to die.

So when James Potter flings himself in Voldemort’s path without even a wand, he laughs that he is probably doing it as much as to ensure the continuation of the tradition as to die bravely.  He laughs at what Lily’s reaction would be if she knew his thoughts.

Because they are of the unfulfilled prophecy and a certainty, despite everything, that not all of the Potters will die tonight.  He dies quickly so Harry will survive.  The prophecy is yet unfulfilled; they cannot both die.

It may be as stupid as Lily believes, but it gives him hope at the moment of death.  His wife never understood that that was what the Quest was all about.

The ability to die with hope in your heart and a laugh on your lips.


	4. E xpectations of a Longbottom

Not like your father.  Not like your mother, for that matter.  Practically a Squib, a sad waste of brilliant genes.  Not like your parents at all.

Well, couldn’t that ever be a good thing?  Just once?  After all, if Frank and Alice Longbottom had been average people, they would be sane right now.  They would be happy and in love and there for him.

But Neville was their son, so it could never be enough for him just to be happy, just to be safely average.  He had to struggle and despair and agonize and hang his head in shame.  He had to will his father’s wand to obey him in vain.

At least he wasn’t the Boy Who Lived, he sometimes consoled himself.  At least he didn’t have that on his plate.

But, Gran’s voice broke into his head, at least Harry is fulfilling his expectations.  At least he is the hero the Potters were always meant to be.  At least he is as good as his parents were.

Neville sometimes thinks that it is so unfair that he has to spend his life living up to his parents’ example, because, in the ways that matter most, he doesn’t have any parents.


	5. B etrothed

The first time that Ted Tonks proposed marriage, Andromeda thought he was joking. “You bothered to get your mother’s ring out just for a gag?” she had asked.

“I love you,” he told her, deathly serious.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” she asked, seriously not understanding. “Marriage is about partnership, uniting families. You seriously think yours could ever mesh with mine?”

“I want to start a new family with you, ‘Dromeda,” he told her.

Andromeda laughed. You couldn’t create a new family, just like that. You could join yours to another, you could build a new relationship. You couldn’t start a whole new replacement family, whatever you felt for the old one.

“Ted, do you really not realize that I’m betrothed?” she told him. All the pureblood families arranged these things from infancy. He knew this. Why would she be any different?

“But you love me,” he insists in confusion, still holding out his silly little ring.

“Don’t be simple, Ted,” she whispers, turning away from him and hating everything that makes her do it, even her family. She grabs the locket with her family crest, and wonders if she really could exchange one silver trinket for another and have a new family.

Then she blinks and leaves him standing there looking foolish. She goes home to the people she knows, the people who call her Andy, the people who have very different plans for her than becoming a Mudblood’s wife. She goes to fulfill their expectations.

This is the way things are done, and her heart has broken the way a hundred hearts have broken before her. This is life; this is what it is to be a Black. Hers was an old story with the ending already well-known. She knew that when she allowed herself to fall for him.

But she wished he had been right, and she had been wrong, even if it meant that everything she had ever believed was a lie.


	6. L acerations

The only thing that disgusts Alecto more than a Muggle, about whom she must prattle all day until she feels the distinct need to bathe, is a pureblood who has no sense of his blood’s worth, who lets it be spilled for such silly little causes, who lets her split his skin and spill his pure blood onto the classroom floor to defend trash.

The only thing worse than the mindless Muggles and thieving Mudbloods is the spirit and nobility of a pureblood twisted into causing trouble in all the wrong places.  So Alecto strikes out at Neville Longbottom and Ginny Weasley and Luna Lovegood and Susan Bones far more viciously than with Halfbloods like Lavender Brown or Michael Corner or Seamus Finnigan, whose allegiance she can at least understand and who do not stain something otherwise immaculate.

It’s the old idea of blood-letting.  Her grandfather always said they shouldn’t have let it go.  At some places the blood gets stuck and goes bad, let it out, and the rest can flow clear and pure.  So she slashed at the purebloods who were obviously ill or improperly raised.

Fury exploded at the very sight of Longbottom, whose parents had broken their minds before their foolish ways, and Alecto Carrow fears she will not be able to save with any of her blood-letting, any of her permanent scars, the last heir of an ancient, proud family from ruin.


	7. O ccupation

That’s what it’s called when an enemy army takes over your residence.  Malfoy Manor was occupied, and its natives were taken as slaves – treated no better, even Bellatrix.  All of their resources were seized by the invading army, and they were utterly subjugated to their general’s will and whim.  They were stripped of any weapons and imprisoned on their own ground.

The humiliation of it…is staggering.  Unfathomable.  Any of his ancestors would not have stood for it, even from the Dark Lord.

Lucius can see it in their eyes: the others will never be able to respect him again.  He is a prisoner of war, and everything on which he has rested his family’s good name and his personal power has been taken out of his control.  His wand is confiscated.  His riches are stolen.  His manor is occupied.  His pride is destroyed.

And he is given no job, no honor, to compensate.  He is not an honored deputy sheltering his lord.  Voldemort has made him nothing.  He was supposed to make him powerful beyond even Lucius’s vivid imagination.  Instead, he has made him contemptible and stripped away everything that signifies his pureblood status.

Is he even a Malfoy anymore without the ancient mansion and the wealth of generations and the respect of the powerful and control of his own life?

Malfoy Manor is in the control of a madman and a halfblood, and Lucius must look on.


	8. O ddball pride

The first time she had come home crying had been your first test.  Would you stand firm and teach her the Lovegood way: to take pride in being different, impossible for others to understand, and above all saying what others don’t dare?  The evidence isn’t as lacking as they all believe, you know, but they are all afraid of looking stupid.  The Lovegoods are not.  That is what you tell her, though you long to hang up your press and dry her tears.  Instead you teach her to wear them with pride.

She hides a lot about her treatment at school, but you guess more than she suspects.  But she is the only member of Dumbledore’s Army that tells her parents exactly what she is doing.  She has the Lovegood pride, to believe in the unpopular, perhaps even unlikely, but the story that _makes sense_.  You know that Luna will never break.

But then she is taken.  She was so proud of you, your “rag” of strange ideas was being taken seriously for once; this was the Lovegoods’ chance to shine.  Your pride in being different, in being one of the daring Lovegoods who don’t care a fig what anyone else thinks, is not enough, in the end, to sustain you when your daughter is captured, enduring Merlin-knows-what, and they have planted a deadly object in your home.

You are glad that Luna never broke, that after that first year in primary school she never again cried.  You are glad that she has too much pride to go along with what she is being persuaded to say.  You are glad that she is still thought heartbreakingly odd, that she is still unfathomable.  You are so proud when she tells you it was the Lovegood pride that kept her from breaking, that her captors couldn’t believe her strange forms of resistance and it gave her new courage each time.

People understand your position, they tell you now.  They understand why you turned.  You’ve become fathomable.

Their understanding feels more like a betrayal than selling Harry Potter to the Snatchers.


	9. D ie fighting, kill laughing

There was an old saying that has grown up out of the centuries of magical history.  Prewetts die fighting.

In the Black household, they add snidely, _and Blacks kill them, laughing._

So when Bellatrix Black sees Molly Prewett sprinting forward flinging her cloak aside, in the same elegant gesture her brothers used to discard their heavy robes, she knows how the story will end.  The way it has ended a hundred times before, the way she has seen it end before.  She has played this part, and she knows the steps.  So she laughs, ready to kill.

Their script had been written before they were born.  The Black taunts, the Prewett screams in righteous determination.  Above all, stand back.  The Prewett is dueling the Black.  The show will be fantastic.  The death with be heroic.  The laughter will be resounding.

Again, Bellatrix laughs that the Prewetts don’t seem to know how this little farce always plays out.  Or not to care.  She remembers how her cousin Sirius looked giving the Black laugh, the triumphant laugh of a Black about to make a kill.

A moment too late to realize what it meant.  As her body absorbs Molly Prewett’s curse, Bellatrix Black’s mind absorbs the meaning of Sirius’s laugh, of the fact that he was laughing at the moment of the kill, not her.  It is a piece of history too recent even to be registered, but it makes all the difference all the same.

The Blacks always knew how to kill laughing.

Now they have learned to die laughing.


	10. E verything you asked of me

Childless.

You had said once that that would have been the height of shame.  Whenever I pointed out that I was the perfect society wife, that I did everything you asked of me, you would almost snarl that I had not given you an heir – that that was the most important duty of all.

Childless.

It means more to a woman than it ever can to a man.  But even so, it was so all-consuming, so all-important to you that, however well I know you, I am still shocked when you throw it away.  What will you do for your precious heir now, Crouch?  I would taunt you if I had the heart.

Childless.

It’s what you have made me.  The only duty I have done for you that has delighted me, that has set me free, has been to raise your son.  “I have no son.”  You turn your back on twenty generations with those words, and all for your present career.  They will not call you the Crouch who became Minister of Magic, but the last Crouch.  Do you even realize what you do?

Childless, you have made me.

I will not die childless, Barty.


	11. D isintegration

There was always madness in the Gaunts, something wild around the eyes.  Pride amidst so much poverty was just the thing to bring it out into full-fledged mania.  There was always an enclosed feeling to the family.  Parseltongue was just the thing to seal its confinement, as snug as a coffin.  There was always something dangerous about the Gaunts.  A burst of new spirit and ambition was just the thing to make their heir a terror.

Even in their flower of success, even in their fine clothes and great manor, even in the height of their power, there was always something unstable about the Gaunts.  Clinging to the past rather than looking at the present was enough for their house to collapse about itself.

The members of the Gaunt family were doomed to repeat a terrible cycle of ambition, feigned importance, and desperation that led them to do all kinds of drastic things: kill a father, attack an Auror, seduce a Muggle, defy death…

There was only one who ever regretted her actions, but she paid the same price as the unrepentant.

The Gaunts were always a tinder box, that might blow up at any moment on the unsuspecting victims around them, and the blaze of their madness left them with nothing but ashes.


	12. ERA comes to a close

Almost none of the old bloodlines survived the War.  Ironically, those thought to be in least danger from it are the most consistent casualties, and they are the ones nearly wiped out by their attempt to destroy all others.

The Averys, Carrows,  Crabbes, Lestranges, Macnairs, Notts, Rookwoods, Rosiers, Runcorns, Selwyns, Traverses, Warringtons, Wilkeses, and Yaxleys were all dead for his cause – killed in the Second War, most at the Battle of Hogwarts when the rest of the Wizarding World finally rose en masse against them.

The Crouches had been eliminated, one by each side.

The Diggorys had been disposed of.

The McKinnons had been wiped out.

The Karkaroffs had been hunted down.

The last Quirrell had been used up and abandoned.

The Blacks had been picked off, by each other mostly.  They always seemed to like doing things that way.

The Dumbledores were literally on their last legs, only one pair remaining and that one old, wrinkled and limping.

The Borgins and the Burkes were finally ruined, their darkness in the open, and cowering in hiding.

The Figgs and Filches were too sunk in shame to continue.

The Jorkinses had been lost.

The Potters and the Weasleys had proudly intermarried themselves out of purity.  The Prewetts survived only through the "contaminated" Weasley line.

The Zabinis finally gave up on convincing wizards to fall for their charms and trickery, moving on to Muggle victims.

The last of the Gaunts had died to end the War.  The last of the Princes as well, but they were not even true purebloods anymore.

The Boneses, Longbottoms, Lovegoods, Goyles, Bagmans, Bulstrodes, Trelawnies and Smiths all had a survivor.

The Malfoys and the Parkinsons were clinging desperately to each other to make a new generation, as had always been their plan.

The Ollivanders continued proudly.

The Thicknesses struggled to live down their shame.

Only a handful left.  Eleven families with any claim to serious purity, only five of them of the Great Bloodlines of wizarding Britain.

If they really wanted to preserve their way of life, they should have continued marrying each other and inbreeding until it was absolutely impossible to marry another pureblood who was not, in essence, your sibling.  Then they could have decided if it was really worth continuing their way of life.  Because of the War, they will reach this point much more quickly.

Ironic, since they started this war to bring the other breeds to the brink of extinction.  War plays all kinds of tricks.


End file.
